Direct Perception

By reading these words and seeking meaning from them, you did not directly perceive the page.

Now go back, don't have read the words, and perceive it without making any abstraction of it.

This is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. So is looking at the rest of the world with DirectPerception.

By reading these words and seeking meaning from them, I DID directly perceive the page. Now go back, stop making inane comments about pristine reality, and sin no more.

What is perception other than a measurement? And measurement never show the reality, but only an abstraction of it (and maybe even a biased one).

Wait. Suppose I did read these words, infer meaning, and become emotional. Did not the light of my monitor strike my retinas? If not, then I have perceived only indirectly. However, if the monitor's glow illuminated my retinas, then that was direct perception. Everything that happens to the signal is the direct perception of some prior state of that signal. Indirectly, I determine that someone thought up some idea which they codified in this page, and who could question that conclusion? It is a fact, and I know it, but only because I've had the direct perception of my monitor while awake.

In the HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy (book 4 or 5 of the trilogy if I remember right) contains a part about a device, that does DirectPerception.